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Was all this mesmerism so much hocus-pocus and nonsense to deceive me, a credulous fool? And yet I was sure Simon would not be a party in deceiving me. But might not I have been deceived by the professor? Could he not make my friend say, not what really existed, but what existed in his own mind? And yet the little man seemed honest! Anyhow, I could do no more, and it was my only hope.
It is, I think, necessary to remember that in 1844, when Miss Martineau tried mesmerism as a cure for her continued ill-health, mesmerism was practically taking its first steps in the English medical world.
"Yes, governor, it's all very well to ask a nervous fellow to Antwerp and amuse him and make him ever so jolly and comfortable But why, when the bleak November wind sobs against the lattice and disturbs the dead ashes in the grate, when everything is damned queer and dark, and that sort of thing, you know why should you make nervous fellows' flesh creep by talk about mesmerism, and dead fellows coming to see live fellows before dying, and the Lord knows what else?
Therewith the somnambule became more tranquil, and said: "Dr. Jones would do well if he would be guided by higher lights than his own skill, and consult herself daily as to the proper remedies. The best remedy of all would be mesmerism. But since Dr. Lloyd's death, she did not know of a mesmerist, sufficiently gifted, in affinity with the patient." In fine, she impressed and awed Mrs.
Hypnotism, Mesmerism, Spiritualism and Psychical Research, are the cloud no bigger than a man's hand that is forcing the facts of Magic again on the attention of both the theological and scientific world. Hypnotism and Psychical Research are already becoming respectable and attracting the attention of the generality of men of science and of our clergy.
"I went to a physician to complain of sleeplessness and got the reply that it was my heart that was diseased.... Your sister's body is so subject to her mind that I do not despair that, either through mesmerism restoring sleep or in some other way, she may rally far beyond her present expectation.
Softly, but firmly, I stroked her brow and temples with both hands, and passed my fingers through her hair to the back of her head. I rarely failed to put her to sleep, and as she never woke when I laid her down, I have since suspected myself of unconscious mesmerism. One night, when I had long been asleep, I was awakened by Matilda's hysterical sobs.
Mesmerism appears, and professes to have discovered another influence by which the nervous system is peculiarly affected; in other words, it merely adds a new influence to the number of those which were universally acknowledged before, it matters little whether it be the Magnetism of Mesmer, or the Odyle of Reichenbach, or the Dia-magnetism of Faraday.
But as he stood over me with feet spread wide and the circle of his axe's swing broadening for the finale, the thread of rabbit-like mesmerism broke and I sprang nimbly aside as the blade buried itself deep in the mud wall I had been cowering against. I endeavoured to dodge him by putting some of my fellow prisoners between us. No use.
A man with some knowledge of mesmerism, and living a life with good interests in it, could defy them: such a case has happened. For nearly fifty years a gentleman was tormented at times, and died and lived sane. The attack has perhaps been more developed in the last twenty or thirty years, the influence of above-board hypnotism acted upon that practised by criminal scoundrels.
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